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The Internet

Wikipedia Blocks Qatar [Updated] 204

Posted by Hemos from the the-law-of-unintended-consequenceas dept.
GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.
Security

Submission + - Burglar turns child porn collector in

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that a burglar was outraged when they found child pornography on a computer in a house they were robbing. They gave a tip to police, and the child porn collector has been arrested, but the burglary case remains unsolved.
Bug

Submission + - Thunderbird devours your mail - forever losing it.

Submitted by niekvs
niekvs writes: Ever since Thunderbird's latest update (1.5.0.8) was released a few weeks ago, a very nasty bug was introduced - and sadly enough the Mozilla team isn't hurrying to release a patch, leaving millions of users exposed. I noticed this problem by accident, when i realized that Thunderbird was downloading far more mails than were showing up in my inbox. The first few days i wasn't paying much attention to it, because sometimes 70% of my mail is automatically redirected to my spam box anyway, but at some point i started actually counting the mails by hand and found out that a large portion of mails just didn't show up, even though they were downloaded. I then followed Mozilla's recommended practice of compacting my mailboxes, to no avail. Desperate, i searched Google for help, and found out that a lot more users were experiencing similar issues (1) (2) with the latest update. The bad thing: compacting actually permanently deletes the missing messages (that are likely mostly spam, but can also be legit). If you haven't done this yet, you should downgrade back to the previous version, 1.5.0.7, exposing yourself to some security issues, but at least having peace of mind that you receive all your mail, and won't receive any angry mails from friends or colleagues asking why you haven't returned their important questions yet. Please read the comments in the bug report for more information. This issue seriously broke my confidence in this program, especially considering that Mozilla appears in no rush to release an update, and are still distributing the buggy version weeks after discovery. In my opinion, this is a much more serious problem than whatever obscure security bug they were trying to fix in this version. Most people probably won't even realize something is wrong, because the mails simply never show up...
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Make's Open Source Gift Guide Needs Your Help

Submitted by
bjepson
bjepson writes: "The Make Magazine Open Source Gift Guide is off to a great start, but we need your help. We've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services, and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. And we're not done, post in the comments on what you think should be in the Open source gift guide and we'll add it! Just stick to the same format we did: name, link, and a couple sentences."
Google

Gaia Project Agrees To Google Cease and Desist 323

Posted by Zonk from the quieting-that-particular-deity dept.
Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, likely to have turned into a demand, affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."
Mozilla

Submission + - ThunderBird 1.5.0.8 fails to show, deletes, e-mail

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: ThunderBird, the open source e-mail application, contains a mail handling issue (BugZilla, please change your referrers) which is causing some e-mails to fail to display. The e-mails have been received, but as they are invisible they may as well not have been. In addition, the recommended practice of compacting folders will cause the invisible e-mails to actually be deleted permanently. The issue, which was discovered well over 2 weeks ago, has been patched for the 1.8.0 branch of ThunderBird — but there has been no word of an official new release or patch before the regularly scheduled December release of version 1.5.0.9.
Emulation (Games)

Submission + - US Copyright Office grants abandonware rights

Submitted by reagor
reagor writes: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/23/us-copyright-off ice-grants-abandonware-rights/ joystic.com Here's something abandonware enthusiasts can be thankful for: the Library of Congress yesterday approved six exemptions to US copyright. The one most pertinent to gamers is that, for archival purposes, copy protection on software no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder can be cracked.
Google

Submission + - Google pressures google earth client offline

Submitted by cycoj
cycoj writes: Recently some some Russian developers reverse engineered the Google Earth protocol and released an open source client. As of today the source code is not available anymore and the page states the following:

"25 November 2006, we've got the letter from Michael Jones, the Chief Technologist of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local search, requesting us to cease reverse engineering and improper usage of licensed data that Google Earth use. We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia)." Is Google starting to "do evil"?
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Open Source Gift Guide

Submitted by
Jason Striegel
Jason Striegel writes: "MAKE Magazine put together a huge list of open source hardware and software gift ideas. It's a great start for spreading a little open source cheer this season, and I'm betting the Slashdot community could contribute a little to the list.

From the article:
There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy — but a lot of the time you actually don't own it, you can't improve upon it, you can't share it or make it better, you certainly can't post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source.
There's everything from MP3 player project kits to Linux based GSM phones.

It begs the question: what are you getting your favorite alpha geek this year?"
Christmas Cheer

Submission + - Geek holiday list

Submitted by
Ricochet
Ricochet writes: "It's that time of year again when computer geeks everywhere won't get what they truely want on their holiday list. It's really hard to ask your loved ones for an ARM Single Board computer with 32M of RAM, 8M of flash, Compact Flash, USB, Ethernet, 2 serial, 20 digital I/O, optional analog I/O, RS485 and a compass in the stock. Without getting that "You'll poke your eye out" stare back at you. So what toys are you looking for this holiday season?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft hands over technical data to EU

Submitted by hankwang
hankwang writes: Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make interoperable software. So far, the EU has imposed fines of €497 and €280 onto Microsoft for abuse of its monopoly. The deadline for this documentation was today. According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages.
Power

Submission + - The Biggest Solar Park To Be Installed In Spain

Submitted by Aloriel
Aloriel writes: A solar park capable of supply 23.2 megawatts will be constructed in Extremadura, one of the poorest regions of Spain. The park will become the biggest, with as the actual one is in Leipzig (Germany) and can supply up to 5 MW of energy. It will have an extension of 65 hectares and have more than 120,000 solar modules. Extremadura became world-known by adopting open source software.
Announcements

Submission + - French parliament migrating to Linux

Submitted by fbattail
fbattail writes: According to Agence France Presse (in french, please use online translation tools if needed) the French parliament (Assemblée nationale) is migrating to Linux workstations.

Details are not known but Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox are part of the software package.

Deputies will soon realize that reading a DVD with a free and open source software is a delict; thanks for the DADVSI bill (French equivalent of DMCA) they voted this summer.

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